Legendary F1 engineer, automotive futurist, and the man behind the world's most compelling supercar—the McLaren F1—Murray, 64, wants you to drive a car made from glass.

C/D: Your career started when you moved from your native South Africa to England for a job that didn’t exist.

GM: Yeah, I’d written to [Colin] Chapman at Lotus, and he’d offered me a job. So I said thanks and see you soon, and then there was about three months while I was selling my stuff and then traveling by ship. I arrived in England and went straight to Hethel, but in ’69 there was a recession, and Lotus had just laid off 60 people, so that was that. Then I really struggled to get a job. I was almost out of time when I stumbled, by accident, into an interview at Brabham, where Ron Tauranac hired me as a junior designer.

C/D: And you were promoted quickly.

GM: Yes, within a year, I was given some big projects to do—a whole Indianapolis concept to design, working with Pete Weismann in California on the transmission. And then Bernie Ecclestone arrived and bought Brabham’s 50 percent of the team, and by the end of the next year, he’d bought out Tauranac’s 50 percent, too. He walked in one day and said, “I’ve fired the other four guys. You’re the new chief designer.”

C/D: You got to run your own F1 team, but how did you get along with Ecclestone?

GM: Fantastically, because he left me alone. Formula 1 was an amazing place to be an engineer in the ’70s. That was what I loved about it. You could have an idea in the bath, go to work the next morning and draw the bits, make them the next day, test them the day after, and then race that weekend and go a second per lap quicker. Now you have 200 aerodynamicists working 240 days a year to go half a second quicker.

C/D: That brings us to the BT46B, which used a fan to increase downforce and won a single race before being withdrawn.

GM: There was nothing in the rules in ’78 to say that you couldn’t have a sucker car as long as the primary function of the fan was cooling the car. I even got a letter saying the car was legal and we could run it until the end of the season, and then they’d change the “primary function” rule.

GM: Yeah, I really do. Every race that car finished, it would have won. It was unstoppable—you could pull 2.0 g in a hairpin bend, you could get a 2.0-g standing start, it didn’t matter what speed you were doing. Everyone would have had to have one—it would have changed F1.

C/D: Then you moved to McLaren where you ran the race team and then headed development of the F1 supercar.

GM: I’d driven a lot of the so-called supercars of the time, Countachs and stuff like that, and the truth was they were pretty grim. Great to look at going past and nice noise, but they were all flawed with poor ­visibility and pedal offsets. I’d started using carbon-fiber monocoques in Formula 1 in 1979, and I wanted to be the first to do it in a road car.

C/D: And after the F1 came the SLR, built for Mercedes. Would it have been different if you’d had a freer rein with it?

GM: Absolutely. It would have been mid-engined for a start. The original weight target was 1400 kilograms [3086 pounds], and we genuinely believed we’d have hit that if we’d had a normally aspirated engine. Then it would have been dynamite, the ultimate GT car ever, probably. It turned out to be 1630 kilograms [3594 pounds] with a supercharged engine—still light for a big car but nothing special. And, of course, it was 300 grand [$460,000] instead of 180 grand [$275,000], which was the original target.

2005 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren

C/D: What’s this new “iStream” thing?

GM: Basically, it’s the final leap in composite construction. Back in ’92, the carbon bits for the F1 cost £70,000 [roughly $100,000] for each car and took six weeks to make. The SLR took six days to make and cut that to £20,000 [$30,000]. Just before I left McLaren, my job was to look at making carbon fiber cheaper, and we developed a new press process where we could make a car in hours for about £6000 [less than $10,000]. So a pretty good scale-down. But iStream takes the next step. We don’t use carbon, we use glass, with a matrix resin that’s cured under low temperature and low pressure—so it’s low energy—and the cycle time is 100 seconds. And the total cost for a monocoque is €109 [roughly $145]. We’re an intellectual-property company; it’s our mission to sell licenses around the world for people to make cars using the iStream process.

C/D: Aside from not slapping down Ecclestone, is there anything else you’d have done differently?

GM: Lots of decisions could have gone really wrong. I got offers all the way through my career to move to other car companies, usually for far more money. And I didn’t take them, but I think, looking back, I always made the right decision.